In March 2024, two fishermen and a dog set out south from Virginia Beach on a 35-foot Scopinich boat. Both were seasoned mariners—one of them, Charlie Griffin, even starred in Wicked Tuna, a reality television show about daring bluefin anglers. That day, Griffin and his friend, Chad Dunn, had been hired to deliver a boat to Manteo, on the northern tip of Roanoke Island.
To reach the island from the open Atlantic, sailors must navigate through Oregon Inlet, a 3-mile-wide stretch of sea that separates Pea Island from Bodie Island on the Outer Banks. Oregon Inlet is infamous for its treacherous waters, and that night, changing tides had made it much rougher than the open sea.
But Griffin had been navigating it since he was 9 years old. He grew up in Wanchese, a fishing village on the south side of Roanoke Island, and had piloted everything from skiffs to 60-footers through the inlet. So when Griffin and his dog, Leila, failed to show up that night, his family in Wanchese didn’t worry at first.
At about 11 p.m., Griffin’s son, Jake, sent a text to check in. He received a bounce-back message: not delivered. Jake, a fisherman himself, called the Coast Guard. The family spent the night waiting. “I was really hoping that they weren’t in phone service, that they were held up outside the inlet waiting for daybreak,” Jake said.
The next morning, the tight-knit community in Wanchese gathered as several boats set out to search. Jake drove to the beach on the inlet’s south side, where he walked across the dune and found a diesel can and a blue-and-white cushion. He called the owners of the Scopinich to ask them the color of the cushions on their boat. They were blue and white.
Jake spent the next few hours waiting for the Coast Guard to confirm what he already knew: The boat had capsized, and the two men had drowned.
Griffin, 62, and Dunn, 36, are the latest casualties of an inlet that has menaced Wanchese’s commercial fishermen for decades. Local fisherman Mark Vrablic said he personally knows of 12 to 15 boats lost there since the 1970s. At least 27 people have died since 1961, according to Steve House, chairman of the Oregon Inlet Task Force, which oversees management of the inlet.
Every fisherman in Dare County has a story about a close call with the inlet’s high winds, sudden waves, and rapidly changing shoals. “I’ve been playing with this business for about 52 years,” said Vrablic, who is 66. “Oregon Inlet, my whole entire life, has always been a treacherous inlet. It’s like going down the highway and knowing you have to go through a real slick place about four or five football fields long.”
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The Modern Graveyard of the Atlantic
Oregon Inlet, a narrow gap near Roanoke Island, is one of the deadliest waterways in the United States. But it’s also an economic lifeline for a small industrial fishing community who must traverse it.
March 27, 2025
The Wanchese fishermen want the green light to build a concrete barrier called a jetty in the inlet to stabilize the shifting sands. They believe it would go a long way toward making their jobs safer and would also encourage out-of-state fishermen to unload their catch at Wanchese rather than heading for safer ports. But despite decades of lobbying, support from local lawmakers, and prior congressional authorization, the jetty proposals have always ultimately failed amid regulatory and environmental concerns.
Growing up, Jake Griffin was always told to respect the inlet and to view it with caution. Now, the inlet haunts him. “There’s not a day I don’t wake up, thinking about walking across that dune,” he said, weeping as he relives that morning. “It’s one of those things I’ll have to face the rest of my life.”
Davy Jones’ Locker
The waters around the Outer Banks are famous for their treachery: The area is called the Graveyard of the Atlantic because of the thousands of ships claimed by its waters in the centuries since the British arrived in North America.
The Outer Banks are difficult to navigate for a variety of reasons: The Gulf Stream and Labrador Current meet there, making the water wild. The depths around the banks are also dotted with shoals; the Diamond Shoals, for example, are a constantly shifting morass of shallow sandbars that jut out eight miles from Cape Hatteras and have scuttled hundreds of boats over the centuries.
Oregon Inlet is relatively new, created by an 1846 hurricane that sliced through the barrier island. The inlet’s birth was a boon to fishing in the northern part of the state. Before, a fisherman heading south from Chesapeake Bay would have to travel 180 miles to Morehead City, then sail up to the west of the Outer Banks to access Pamlico Sound. But Oregon Inlet created a throughway, making it so fishermen could sail just 10 miles from the open Atlantic to the port at Wanchese.
If you’ve driven south from Nag’s Head on Route 12 to the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, then you’ve driven over Oregon Inlet. The 3-mile-long Marc Basnight Bridge spans the choppy waters, which froth between rocks and dunes as dolphins leap beneath the bridge and shorebirds dive overhead. It’s a beautiful view, but the whitecaps pocking the water portend the dangers of the shifting shoals. With mercurial winds and the daily tides, the area becomes a minefield for mariners. Smaller boats capsize; larger boats run aground and get stuck.
On a sunny day in late January, the commercial fishermen hanging around Etheridge Seafood in Wanchese shared their inlet horror stories. Fishermen from Wanchese and up and down the East Coast unload their daily catch of flounder, grouper, and croakers here. That day, the men chattering on the dock were unloading jumping mullets that they’d caught in Pamlico Sound. The inlet was “slick calm,” in the local parlance, with southwest winds—safe to navigate, for now.
To manage their stress navigating the inlet, fishermen say, they smoke and bite their nails. One fisherman testifying about the inlet to Congress in the 1980s famously said that he always kept a cough drop in his mouth when passing through the inlet, so his throat didn’t get too dry to call for help over the radio.
Robert Hansen is a commercial fisherman who works for Etheridge and currently owns a boat called the Seneca. But he used to have another, the Foxy Lady. On Thanksgiving Day 2001, he got a call to assist a fishing boat out in the inlet during a gale. The Foxy Lady rolled upside down, and he spent 25 minutes in the freezing water.
“I was scared to death. I was naked. I swam out of every bit of clothes I had,” Hansen said. “I’m sweating right now just talking about something that happened 25 years ago.”
Vrablic doesn’t venture into the inlet himself anymore, but he still remembers an incident from the 1980s, when he picked up a man who’d been washed off his boat in the inlet. He was black and blue, clawing at his chest; he later died of hypothermia. “When things like that happen to you, and you see somebody dying, and the waves are washing your boat, and everybody’s getting shocked by electricity [because waves are swamping the boat’s electrical system], it’ll do something to you,” said Vrablic.
Tommy Danchese, another fisherman who works out of Etheridge’s, remembered trying to rescue a trawl boat from a shoal in 2010. His boat ended up capsized, and he sat on its side for 45 minutes in the freezing cold before he was rescued. Now, Danchese makes a point to lead other boats through the inlet to save them from what happened to him. If he hears of someone in trouble, he’ll take his boat—it’s a Hulls Unlimited motorboat, shallow, only three feet, which makes it easier to navigate the shoals—and tow them in.
The Wanchese fishermen acknowledge that their industry is imperiled for many other reasons: the commercial versus recreational battles, for instance, and what they view as overregulation.
But they say that the inlet certainly doesn’t help. To reach Wanchese without going through the inlet, one would have to motor all the way down to Beaufort, then back up Pamlico Sound. Vrablic said he knows one fisherman who does just that, using an extra 400 gallons of fuel and spending an additional 24 hours to make it to Wanchese. But most fishermen will opt to unload at other ports instead.
Vrablic doesn’t blame them. “This place has as bad a reputation as the Kremlin,” he said.
By that Saturday afternoon, the inlet was no longer calm. The winds had shifted to the northeast, and the tide was running against the wind: a breeding ground for big waves.
At An Impasse
Fishermen in Wanchese have been agitating at the federal level for a jetty since the mid-20th century. “A jetty would be better than whitebread,” Vrablic said.
Jetties are man-made structures that protrude from land out into a body of water. The cement walkway jutting out into the sea at Wrightsville Beach, for example, is a jetty. Jetties are typically built to break rough water and hold sand in place.
While fishermen have been advocating for a jetty in the inlet for decades, conservationists say it would wreak too much havoc on water quality, on breeding grounds for key species like flounder, blue crab, white shrimp, bluefish, and sharks, and on the migration of fish larvae. Environmental groups have opposed hardened structures like jetties along shorelines because they can also increase erosion.
For some years, it looked like fishermen would get their wish. In 1970, Congress authorized the construction of two jetties in the inlet. But they never appropriated funds, and the next 30 years saw an entrenched, protracted battle featuring environmental lawsuits, economic studies, and analyses to determine whether the jetties would cause too much damage to the Outer Banks.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration opposed the project, as did famous conservationists like Orrin Pilkey, the pugnacious Duke University geology professor who died last December and who bragged about his anti-jetty reputation. These opponents said the proposed project would hurt breeding grounds for fish and habitat for crabs, shrimp, and sharks. The National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service worried about erosion on Cape Hatteras National Seashore, which borders the inlet to the north, and Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge, which borders the inlet to the south.
After decades of back and forth, debate among federal agencies, and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers economic and environmental studies, the project died in 2003. The Bush White House announced that the potential economic benefit, which studies showed would be meager, wouldn’t outweigh the environmental damage.
In 1985, the N.C. General Assembly passed a law banning hardened coastline structures.The ban was lifted in 2011, but only for a limited number of structures. They are still not allowed in the Oregon Inlet.
Some lawmakers are pushing for a jetty again, and Republican Congressman Greg Murphy, whose district includes the Outer Banks, asked for a $500,000 appropriation for a jetty feasibility study in 2024. But actually resurrecting the jetty plan would require both congressional action and sign-off from nearly 50 state and federal agencies.
They would need “all these people together by campfires to sing ‘Kumbaya’ to get that to happen,” as House, chair of the Oregon Inlet Task Force, put it–“an astronomical challenge.”
Alyson Flynn, a coastal advocate at the North Carolina Coastal Federation, lives in Hatteras and works in Wanchese; she takes the bridge over the inlet every day. Flynn said while she’d have to assess any proposed solution for the inlet on a case-by-case basis, the federation generally opposes hardened structures along the coast.
In an ideal world, Flynn said, the barrier islands surrounding the inlet would continue to be allowed to shift and move naturally, without the control of a jetty–although she acknowledged that the reality of the situation for the fishermen in Wanchese makes this particular situation much more complicated.
“It’s not going to take just one silver bullet that’s going to fix a coastal management concern, especially in Oregon Inlet,” Flynn said. “It’s a big reason the Outer Banks is called the Graveyard of the Atlantic.”
There is one major safety feature in the inlet that’s improved over the past decades: a dredge named Miss Katie. The boat that scoops or drags sand around, preventing shoaling, arrived in Wanchese in 2022, and for $12 million a year from Dare County and the state of North Carolina, it motors around the inlet making sure that channels stay clear.
Everyone agrees that the Miss Katie has made Oregon Inlet better. House said that last August, for the first time in 12 years, a fully loaded trawler 10 feet deep made it into the inlet. And their permit from the Army Corps of Engineers allows them to dredge up to 14 feet in the interior inlet, compared with just eight in the past.
The fishermen of Wanchese agree: With the Miss Katie out there, the inlet’s far more navigable than it used to be. But they still say it’s not enough.
On a cold January Saturday, Jake Griffin was standing out in the wind prepping nets to catch dogfish. He recalled his own close call in the inlet: About a decade ago, during a storm, he hit a shoal on a hard ebb tide–when the tide is rapidly receding from the shoreline. His boat fell onto its side and started taking on water.
Now, whenever he sails through the Oregon Inlet, he goes into the back of the boat and breaks down crying, thinking about his dad. But what can he do? He can’t avoid it: It’s the road he takes to work.
“I can’t fathom why we cannot get support around this place,” he said. “Why does it have to take people losing their lives to get any sort of awareness of how bad a shape we’re in here?”
Emily Cataneo is a writer and journalist based in Raleigh. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, Slate, Atlas Obscura, Undark, and many other venues. She is a co-founder of Raleigh’s Redbud Writing Project.